It shocks me as a devoted Firefox user to say this, but Internet Explorer 9 could very well leapfrog the competition in the race of next-generation of web browsers in 2010 thanks to a groundbreaking platform-wide implementation of a hardware-accelerated renderer that I think is quite literally “a free upgrade for the web”.

What makes IE9’s implementation of hardware-acceleration so compelling is that it has major real-world benefits and its completely transparent to both end-user and web developers. Using the new capabilities in Direct2D instead of GDI, IE9 is able to rendering all the visual elements of websites much faster and smoother using the powers of the graphics processing unit (GPU), instead of the CPU. One example of where this functionality really shines is in the Bing Maps demo where continuously panning the map is just as smooth as navigating a map in a 3D strategy game.

During a meeting with IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch, he explained that this feature hasn’t already been implemented (or publically demoed) in other mainstream browsers today is because by no means this is an easy feat to accomplish. At least one issue he pointed out was the fact that there may be other components inside a frame that handles its own rendering, like Adobe Flash for example.

Having already overcome the major implementation issues, Dean was able to confirm this feature does not actually introduce any incompatibility issues besides a subtle difference in the layout of text as fonts are rendered by the more advanced DirectWrite engine.

Essentially, this feature coupled with an already improved and continued investment in web standards and overall browser performance until it is released, IE9 is in great shape to become the browser with the best browsing experience in 2010 when one might expect it to ship as a standalone download.

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100 insightful thoughts

I agree whole-heartedly, being a die-hard MS fanboy, I was seriously thinking of switching to another browser (chrome) instead of IE8, but with this demo, I think I’ll stick it out for another 6 months until the spring, when the tech preview hits…

Is this new feature something you’d have to design for, though, or something that just automatically works on its own? Because if it’s the former, the only place that we’ll see it is on Microsoft’s sites. >.>b

I am a die hard MS fan too, but somehow IE always pisses me off, but I’m always looking forward to the next IE version, and hope that they get Ctrl-L right, it should focus on the address bar, thats the first keycombo I use when opening a browser, and if that doesn’t work, then i do get pissed.

Only if they start making frequent point releases (8.x) with features it would keep the pressure on the competition. If they continue to take a couple of yrs between release, I dont think they can overtake Firefox and Chrome.

IE and WM are only ones coming out of MS that i hate…. MS has been sleeping on these for toooo long.

@Ashish: you said “…it should focus on the address bar…thats the first keycombo I use when opening a browser and if that doesen’t work..”… but.. but.. when you open IE8, it is indeed focused on address bar *by default*.

Long, does your idea of “the web” exclude Windows XP users? (70%+) Because MS has not ported WDDM/DirectWrite/Direct2D to Windows XP? IE9 is *DEFINITELY* coming for XP but that version will continue to probably use GDI. That’s MS’s way ot making us upgrade. And now Windows 7 fanboy comments will follow with “What? You’re still on XP?”. But the 70% of the world’s users still are.

I recently switched to Google Chrome, using it for a month now, but will gladly return back to IE9 if Microsoft gets it right. First keep it lightweight meaning no extra plugins or web addons and small download size. Second keep it simple with a easy to use no extra button UI because screen real estate is precious. Third most important thing is please protect me for malware and other bad stuff even if I visit unknown and bad websites maybe use a sandbox as I exit IE9 bad stuff is automatically purged from my system.

But they’ve got a standards compliant cross browser way of doing hardware accelerated rendering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL. Again they’re using proprietary technologies like DirectWrite and Direct2D which the vast majority of Windows (XP) users don’t have access to. WebGL is already there in the nightlies of Safari and Firefox. Why is Microsoft’s priority not supporting Canvas, SVG and DOM2 instead of using Windows-specific technologies and coming up with a new version of Silverlight every year at MIX?

Still, what keeps me returning to Firefox is the plug-ins.
When you have a product used by millions of people, for millions different tasks, you need to power of plug-ins to let the user personalize without bloating the product core.

Nice, and I hope other browsers follow suit, but scrolling a large map in Bing (or whatever) works well enough in any browser. Making that smooth is far less important to me than the custom features I get from all my Firefox extensions.

If MS want me to switch back to IE, they’re going to have to do something about that. Maybe provide an easier way for IE to be extended and do other things to encourage an extension community.

Same reason that Chrome’s Javascript performance didn’t get me to switch: I don’t care about that at all compared to the features of the browser/extensions, where FF wins hands down. (Chrome has a lot of potential and is moving very quickly, though. Switching to it one day isn’t out of the question.)

No sandboxie, no extensions.
As MS is still target of hackers and virii out there.. i wont buy a mobile to spend money on internet security subscriptions every year having android, MS is dead, just on a second partition (STILL XP and enough) to use adobe premiere, the rest of things.. everything Google.

guess ie8 is the last shipping for xp based oses or like someone allready said it just wont ship with the text rendering but it will still employ direct 2d. but i still think ms is still going with the plan of not releasing any major updates like ie since they have been known to stop dev. on certain parts of a windows os & port it to a new os example windows media center

I’m pretty sure the Firefox rendering engine is OpenGL accelerated (not related to WebGL) and it happened quite a while back & there were some impressive performance gains from it. They defintely did something because I recall reading blog posts about it on Mozilla dev blogs and getting a multi-platform back-end to use OpenGL working for Windows/OSX/Linux.

Now whether Firefox actually makes use of OpenGL using the full power of a GPU is another matter, it probably doesn’t but if Microsoft can get Direct2D GPU support and big performance gains all the better.

WTF? As a follower of pragmatism, I’m no fanboy, but seriously, just because IE9’s gonna get hardware acceleration it will “leapfrog” the competition? That’s like saying, “Yo dawg, we got tabs, we da best.” Firefox and Chrome are essentially moving at light-speed at this point; hell Firefox is /already/ using Cairo, which will use hardware acceleration when available.

I don’t see this one feature making IE9 the break-out hit of the year or anything.

“Long, does your idea of “the web” exclude Windows XP users? (70%+) Because MS has not ported WDDM/DirectWrite/Direct2D to Windows XP? IE9 is *DEFINITELY* coming for XP but that version will continue to probably use GDI. That’s MS’s way ot making us upgrade. And now Windows 7 fanboy comments will follow with “What? You’re still on XP?”. But the 70% of the world’s users still are”

I wouldn’t worry about it, them noob idiots at MS fuck up all the time. This will be no different, GPU acceleration will be used to hide the sloppy flaws and poor sub standards support, while highlighting to idiots that its faster in a few circumstances, but it won’t really be overall nor will it really matter when you take away all that it can’t do properly. What will still remain is a pile of shit engine with a standards deficiency(thus still dividing web developers time), it will still use a pile of shit looking GUI (as standard with all noob crap coming out of MS since visteergh), it will still have a serious lack of decent enhanced usability and power extensions with a lack of developer interest, combined with piss poor user customization and shit privacy and security control given to the user. It will be still be broken, if not more so while you wait for the next blue moon update to fix all the sloppy shit.. Most have realized this is the MS game, and most are waking up to this cheap shit trick.

And what most people aren’t realizing is that just how shit this GPU acceleration could be compared to already well established GDI support(I’m not saying things don’t need to move onto the GPU they do, but not the MS way), I always have multiple tabs often 60+ , you only have to look at the dumb shit architecture d way MS built in the multiple iexplorer.exe processes for each new tab and the delays and retardedness of that approach, doesn’t even compare to the better Google chrome approach, although Chrome is very much shit compared Firefox. But GPU accererated browsing will be aimed at the noob, much how IE7/8 was designed and aimed at the noob who barely knows what a TAB is, let alone has more than 3 of them open at once.

utter shit all round, including that crap Explorer shell. MS are slowly dying, and tbh I couldn’t give a shit, they’ve done this to themselves starting with that Vista fuck up, and they’ve continued along the same path. Delivering shit for noobs, soon that is all they’ll have left while everyone else goes to improve other platforms. XP is there last decent OS, everything else has been fuck up. Noobs alone won’t keep you afloat MS, although you’ve definitely amassed a lot of themtards.

btw what is the uptake of Silverlight, I always thought I might try it out by v3, but MS are hopeless, Flash still reigns king on the web. Just saying.

Very cool, I would love to see better browsers, and an improved IE would drive innovation. I’d like to see a “No-Scripts” feature built in since Java Script is basically busted. They also need to integrate well with HTML 5 to be competitive.

@ghjgjh: In all seriousness, anyone who is still using XP by 2010 is missing out. However, Internet Explorer 9 will continue to work on XP since DirectX has software-mode fallbacks that I believe works on systems without a GPU or systems without the proper DirectX support.

@Gerry: The fact is, they already have this really complicated rendering system in place, they can spend all the time on standards and what not until they ship. I think that’s what makes IE9 so interesting.

@Long, anyone who’s on Windows 7 in 2009 and Vista in 2006 is also missing out. They’re so wowed by the hype that they’re not even realizing what they’re missing out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_Vista
MS is trading new features for old ones. While adding new features, they’re breaking old ones. XP loyalists are not fools to stick to the old OS and not see the obvious improvements in Windows 7. They also see the deficiencies which MS is refusing to fix. Who’d know better than you since you started Aerotaskforce and Windows7Taskforce? These new OSes don’t have certain important features that XP has but people don’t realize. Which OS is better is subjective, Windows 7 is still not clearly better, everyone is carried away by the hype. The market share shows how long XP is going to be around.

“@ghjgjh: In all seriousness, anyone who is still using XP by 2010 is missing out. ”

In all seriousness Long, missing out on what exactly? The feeling of enjoying a crap OS along with fellow stupid noob sheep? I can miss out on that, easily, knowing (of and using) better has that effect. I might change my opinion if Win7 wasn’t such a joke, but I haven’t seen any third party development progress fixing up all the noob shit MS chucked out, and I’m talking like since Vista really. Could start with some much needed decent shell extension support… to enhance the explorer from the pitiful crap that it is! nope not seeing any progress in that area. Uness you call some of the most pathetic taskbar extensions progress, ofc the decent ones haven’t been upgraded to work with shi7..

Or to use the half assed pile craplooking Aero GUI with pathetic theme customization.. Yeh sure I’ll swap to that and lose my far far better XP visual style, where everything not only looks better and in place, but desktop performance is far greater, and GPU isn’t tied up doing crap I don’t need it to do, nor did I want it doing, just to have a shit looking desktop with transparent crap, and faded window titles with some crap background blur shadow that you don’t have any control over -You designs uncustomizable this shit eh. And for production software, Adobe, Autodesk etc and crap Nvidia driver support for multimon, using the aero gui is the last stinking thing needed, no wonder its so often suggested to disable it, and then you get something even far far worse than the XP visual style.. welcome to uber shit looking OS win7.And the very fact every other company is making there own products GUI, says one thing. MS fucked UP bigtime! So no I woudn’t use that pile crap. Not to mention the dumb oversized noob layouts and explorer shell prompts etc. Or that pathetic joke of control panel screwup or the shitTest search. etc etc etc Win7 junk just stinks of lame crap and broken junk with useless changes all round. XP will in 2010 still be more popular and in use than shitty Windows 7. Very disappointing really.

DX11?
maybe you should have said 2011, actually make that 2012, then I might be missing out ( at least I hope so).. but then I expect those idiots at MS to have actually done something that might be worth taking another look at, its not like they are short on user suggested ideas not to fuck up on, and do right! Some actual fucking progress and decent changes in Windows 8. Win7 is forgettable garbage for clueless noobs, to upgrade away from as soon the next installment comes along. Unlike XP which has lasted very well over the years, I wonder why.. oh hangon I already know many reasons why it does. Perhaps one part of it is that every change MS has done wasn’t for better, it was just fucked up crap for clueless noobtards.

And nothing I’ve read about IE9 makes it interesting, but you went to PDC and this is your blog, so I understand the bias, still I bet Firefox will have an increased marketshare and continue snub IE out, that is where my support is now, it will still have much better extension support providing all the power functionality along with customization and control! that power users want. That more than anything will matter more than some crap half assed GPU enhanced browser with strings attached because it won’t all be rosy anyone can bet on that. Its a shame Maxthon3 didn’t dump the IE rendering engine. Focus on web-kit they could really have progressed out of the slump of being attached to the shittest engine that couldn’t. And you know if MS weren’t complete tools they would have started and pushed forward with the enhanced GPU approach to IE a long time ago.. that’s if they weren’t complete and utter tools… now I just hope MS continue to lose market share in everything, they chose the fail path many years ago in the things they’ve done and the way they did them, and that is the way they should carry on going, because this isn’t a change, its just a grab for attention. What’s so fucking stupid are the retards who say ..

ooh wonderful MS i’ll continue to use your scrap IE shite and other crap, because a new version is coming in the not so distant future.. ooh love you MS, you’re so wonderful providing me with such noobshit that is totally built for my small simple minded noob brain 😛 -my impression of sucksofts average sucked in noob.

Guys really. I actually agree with Long Zheng here. I use Windows 7 on a regular basis. I have had it installed for the past 3 months and it works great. Alot of people who used Vista in the past (and hated it) have tried Windows 7 and have really liked it.

There are too many great features on both Vista and 7 over XP for me to type on my phone here. But I do take exception to this calling of Aero etc shit. Surely unused resources are wasted resources? Like people look at Task Manager in Vista or 7 for the first time and are shocked to see only 50MB or so of free
memory (not understanding available is the what they are actually looking for) and immediately think ohhh it’s bloated I’m going back to XP but seeing how XP is primitive in many ways especialy in terms of prefetching abilities that if you don’t want Windows to use whatever hardware you bought then just remove from your computer. Ultimately XP is going whether die hards like it or not, and in the computing age, using a 8 year old operating system being used today would be seen as criminal both in terms of performance and security. XP may still have a massive market share but remember it doesn’t represent the whole truth as there will be people primarily businesses who can’t leave XP for compatibility issues for bespoke line of business applications etc, don’t assume everyone using XP today wants to.

P.S.: not that they have an option not to, HTML5 , css animations, 3d canvas and whatnot will require the best possible use of GPU resources. Shame on the IE team for not announcing any new standard support beyond rounded borders btw. 😛

Hi, I agree with Long on this one.
I’ve been using Vista since way back in early stages of RC. Yes, there were multiple problems regarding the new driver model and system stability. Now, Microsoft has patched (most) of the bugs and Service Pack 2 has virtually increased overall stability and performance issues.

Enter Windows 7, using the same driver model as Windows Vista – with virtually NO problems at all! PnP support is wayyyyyy better than XP ever had it.

Regarding IE, I’ve read multiple reports that IE9 will be supporting Hardware Acceleration… Do you even know what that means?! It means faster rendering, cleaner graphics – and most probably, a higher score on the currently low Acid scores that IE has been getting…

@ghjgjh. You seemed like you were raving a lot. This is a blog, not a place for flame wars…
I didn’t fully read your post, but I could get the idea that you’re still using XP – even though you claim to “know a lot”. It also seems that you haven’t actually used Vista/7 “full-time” yet. Reading ‘reviews, crits, blogs, comments’ about an OS does not make you experience it.

Just because XP boots up faster than Windows Vista OR even Windows 7, it doesn’t mean it’s faster overall and more reliable. You should either do some more research or intstall Windows 7 and try it for yourself before flaming on everyone in this blog.

Many companies will be converting to Windows 7, be assured of that. XP will not live forever.

You think I base my views on trivial user interface issues? lol , actually it goes a lot deeper than that, the problem is explaining in detail and really it would have to be in detail every sodding area and facet of shit in visteergh/win7. That is a problem and a sign of complete and utter slop design even architecturally. You could say 7taskforce is a pretty big library of many the areas of stupidity though.

And take firefox its not faster at starting up, even less so 70+ extensions chuck in on a ramdrive, problem sorted, compare that with IE, it doesn’t even compare in anything! NOTHING. That is the same as my XP setup, Win7 just doesn’t even compare. Win7 isn’t an improvement in anything when you really look into it, And those extensions, tweaks, where the fuck are they LONG , where the fuck are they!!? that’s is right, they’re broken, some of the most retarded changes that weren’t better than the very pre-existing enhancements, ‘qttabbar’ there you go look into that fucker. I’m not naming the rest but lets just say Win7 is a stinky turd of dogshit! and I won’t get tired of saying it until it changes. -it won’t, because its just a complete joke in all areas.

“Many companies will be converting to Windows 7, be assured of that. ”

No they won’t, and most that do will look for ways of internally reverting back away from that shite pile.

“Just because XP boots up faster than Windows Vista OR even Windows 7, it doesn’t mean it’s faster overall and more reliable. You should either do some more research or intstall Windows 7 and try it for yourself before flaming on everyone in this blog.”

Do more research?, use that junk full time? lol gimme break, you don’t need more than a day with Win7 to experience the dumb down shit of it all. Just make sure you have net connection because you’ll be needing it to find out all reg tweaks and tools to moves things away for defaulty retardness that those asshats at MS choose as default settings without providing decent UI customization for. And win7 could have a faster boot(it doesn’t really its just a false perception), but I place far greater importance on areas where win7 is complete utter shit. Perhaps its you who should do more research, you clearly cannot grasp the situation. And that goes to that other idiot LegendKillerUK.

@De
Not if you have a homepage set. It indeed selects the address bar, it when I open a new tab..but when I want to open a new address from my current page, I have no choice. Not until Jeff garson told me about Alt-d.
And yes..I have ofcourse used IE8. I have downloaded every beta of IE8. Don’t take offense, its a perfectly good browser, but not really for touch typists.
Btw..Have you seen Pivot, I hope Microsoft incorporates its history feature.

Hey man, relax. All I’m saying is that no amount of ‘research’ will ‘explain’ the UX from Windows Vista or 7.
If you’re pc is already quite old, of course WinVista or 7 will work sluggishly. You cannot use the same (low) specs that you used in XP for 7 – that’s not even an arguable fact – newer needs more. Maybe you’re right… the Architecture is “shit”… Who cares? It works smoothly. Has more shiney features that render (correctly). Has more security holes plugged and is overall, less prone to break when compared to XP (when I used it).

Bottom line: No amount of research can justify Win6/7’s UX.
and this is no place to blame anyone, including the blog owner. It’s a BLOG. not a News feed! E&OE CAN be expected!

I don’t have old low spec hardware, why is it that such a common assumption, I have an above average pc hardware. To think someone else doesn’t like something that you do must mean they haven’t got as good as hardware to run it as you…. is just short sighted and pathetic. When the reason for me is that it just doesn’t live upto a higher set of standards. It doesn’t even reach the same level of functionality I have on my XP setup nor does it look as good. How much of that shit that comes with Win7 is even vaguely useful, the search? no its scrap, the new iconized shittaskbar look? no its useless with the crap control over it. The AeroGUI with GPU acceleration? lol what a joke. The explorer? eurgh lets not even go there its just worse etc Nothing is actually any good when you weigh up the pros/cons, because most of changes are cons. You only have to look at what is readily available to XP. And I will say throwing faster hardware at an OS that was designed and implemented so fucking badly and chucked out the window for sales, that faster hardware is needed not to notice the flaws and drawbacks.. that is pretty bad. Down right stupid if you realized that for all the drawbacks and having faster hardware doesn’t actually improve anything really.

So just having faster hardware doesn’t do anything to improve the what is already a pretty tragic explorer shell. And believe me, if most users weren’t complete and utter noobs they would realize they lose more productivity and workflow speed from a shitty UI/UX with poor features and functionality, its the same type of frustration as waiting for an OS to load something up(which win7 doesn’t really do any better at all, especially when you consider a user does the same workflow steps X number of times MORE than they do opening application Y up). PC hardware is not the problem nowadays, its the software and meatheads who design it without giving the user who has to use it the most control/customization and flexibleness to enhance it with extensions. MS poorly hardcoding settings that should be easily changeable is just another area of stupidity, but you can see why they do it and other things, last thing they want is anyone else fixing there poorly designed shit. Don’t want an XP ever again.

And a small example take the Winxp Display properties dialog with tabs for all other related areas all nicely presented, screensaver, themes, settings etc all that shit.. now compare it to the mega fuckup of the visteergh/7 control panel layouts.. it is beyond retarded. Added extra steps every fucking where.. that ain’t improvement, that is retarded!

MS just can’t do shit right at all, satisfy the most basic inept users who are happy with whatever shit you give them and flash it up to look different, strip away control and functionality in favor of simplified clean looking crap. Add in easily marketable crap like DX11, supershitbar etc. That is what MS is about these days, its just so much easier to do that, make the average user accept inferior shit and do nothing to fix anything else. And you know what, I think its all MS can do judging by the employees they have working on different projects, whatever talent they ever had is gone, and it shows right through vista/ I mean 7.

Apple is going to have some real equal competition on its hands, what with Windows dumbing itself down at such a rapid pace.

@Bill you’re an idiot, and you like tarted up shit, to say XP UI is pathetic? lol are you stupid? when you compare a customized XP ui (because you can) to that pile of crap Win7 shite, that is beyond worse and no improvement insight anywhere… and go disable Aero gpu take a fucking look at that visual style shit! doesn’t help the explorer shell looks like complete ass. Transparency glass effect gimmicks -good for noobs like Bill, and having lots of running windows with Win7 is a lot slower than normal gdi handled drawing on xp. Benefit ? fuck all.

@XP User
Nov 19th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
“Long, does your idea of “the web” exclude Windows XP users? (70%+) Because MS has not ported WDDM/DirectWrite/Direct2D to Windows XP? IE9 is *DEFINITELY* coming for XP but that version will continue to probably use GDI. That’s MS’s way ot making us upgrade. And now Windows 7 fanboy comments will follow with “What? You’re still on XP?”. But the 70% of the world’s users still are.”

83.58554564542514415414254154134132413548348343843% of statistics are not made up on the spot.
—————————–

re-read it, yeah I should have made it more cutting, highlighted more examples of Microsuck failage. And why XP still lives on because of it. Dwain you could learn a lot aswel if you pulled your head out the clouds. And stopped recommending garbage videos that haven’t got FUCK ALL to do with what were talking about here! open-mindedness, yes I’ve used and looked into win7 and seen the flaws more than most here. So just go back to your lalala land and using your crap shi7e OS and perhaps attend noobskool out the way, where you can’t get offended by those wanted to see better than the crippled junk delivered.

@Tommo you really didn’t need to add “Satisfied IE8 user on Windows 7” (satisfied with crap software lol) it makes you sound like even more of a noob… As I could already tell you were an idiot before I even got to your last sentence. NOOB>>>> “In regard to the great news previously mentioned: fade effects plus lots of CSS shadows and rounded corners = GDI fail… Or what ever Firefox and Safari use… .” <<<<<

I don’t like IE8. Probably not for the reasons most do. I find it cumbersome, and I don’t know and don’t want to know about “web slices” – I wonder who came up with that dandy name? Someone making much more than me, I am certain. IE wants us to interact with it now. The privacy setting is for when you want to buy your loved one a present. Well, if your loved one is checking out your history and cache, they know about your porn addiction anyway.

I cannot believe I have come to this point – but Firefox has been getting very close to the “uninstall threshold” several times. Only a few add-ons that don’t work anywhere else have saved it. About once every hour or two hours Firefox becomes “embarrassed” because it again, has [email protected] things up. It used to be so smooth that I never even considered this browser would have “Oops” episodes a few times a day.

Google Chrome won’t work for me right now, because I have a weird error message that pops up for half a second and then closes Chrome: the application was unable to start correctly (0xc00000a5). Click OK to close the application. No need to click, it is gone. I googled the error number and it is some kind of windows problem,
I saw nothing re: Chrome. I don’t have the time right now to brave the MS help labyrinth.

I might very well be alone here, and maybe Vista has rendered me dim-witted. But I am seriously considering going back to Vista. Windows 7 is noticeably slower. Like a lot. Programs are taking longer to start. Firefox will appear when it is good and gd ready. Over a minute sometimes! I have the AMD quad 4 with 4 mgs of memory, so why, when I am not doing anything graphic-intensive, or playing an RPG game, is it slow?

I do the control-alt-del, and Firefox is using 247,388kbs (!) and i Tunes is using 164,132kb. Is it too much to want to listen to music while answering emails and writing a bit? Yes, both programs are horrible pigs. I use System Mechanic to defrag the memory, etc. But the whole experience is very palpable and slow. The Jump lists don’t do much for me, and the task bar is a spazz now, losing icons and replacing them with the default no-icon icon. Buttons, programs become unclickable, it looks like a junkyard.

I know this goes against the majority of users, but using my computer was never palpable before. I just got on it, did what I wanted to do, and honestly – after I got a few driver problems fixed, Vista (with the UAC turned off) it never gave me a hard time.

I did a reformat, and a clean install of W7, btw. I am a man without a browser, without an OS. =)
Opera is looking good. Has anyone here tried it? Is Internet Explorer 9 downloadable or is it in alpha stage?

“Having already overcame the major implementation issues, Dean was able to confirm this feature does not actually introduce any incompatibility issues besides a subtle difference in the layout of text as fonts are rendered by the more advanced DirectWrite engine.”

Besides, both the imminent Google Chrome 4 and Firefox 3.7 are going to get bookmark synchronization and extensions (old news for Firefox) on a scale IE doesn’t seem to have plans to meet yet. And it still doesn’t do SVG.

I think the IE 9 improvements sounds *promising*, and that MS is most importantly on the right track here, but whether they’ll catch up with the competition remains to be seen. It’s far from certain to me, but one can hope they’ll become very competitive. This is always good for the end users. Switching to a hardware accelerated renderer could mean practically anything in terms of performance boosts though. From neglible on some systems, to major improvements. I’m feeling much more cautious than this article gives the impression of.

I will take a look at IE9, but it had better be much better than Safari or Chrome. I switched from FF to Safari because I could run it on both my PowerBook and my Toshiba tablet. I was tempted to try Chrome, but maybe I’ll give IE9 a trial run.

@edward
Could you please paraphrase so everyone else can understand?
IE9 is not yet available for download because it is unrelased as of yet.
What ever else you’re going on about is a user issue, not a broswer issue.

I have just downloaded explorer 9 to test out how my website would look with microsofts new browser.
Now to roll back to explorer 8.
Why, because all of the websites that I checked with explorer 9 were slow to load up.
Who wants a browser that is slower???
Give me what I want, dont tell me to upgrade my hardware or my OS.
Stick with explorer 8 or your current browser.
Explorer 9 is not worth trying!

I agree whole-heartedly, being a die-hard MS fanboy, I was seriously thinking of switching to another browser (chrome) instead of IE8, but with this demo, I think I’ll stick it out for another 6 months until the spring, when the tech preview hits…

I have just downloaded explorer 9 to test out how my website would look with microsofts new browser.
Now to roll back to explorer 8.
Why, because all of the websites that I checked with explorer 9 were slow to load up.
Who wants a browser that is slower???
Give me what I want, dont tell me to upgrade my hardware or my OS.
Stick with explorer 8 or your current browser.
Explorer 9 is not worth trying!